- While buying entire stables
With power being their sole aim, major political parties in Pakistan welcome with open arms carpetbaggers, fortune hunters and habitual turncoats into their fold provided they are electable. It came as a surprise therefore when ‘holier than thou’ Imran Khan issued notices to 20 party legislators to explain why they should not be expelled for selling their votes during the recent Senate elections. It was a selective approach, however, as no notice was issued to a prominent PTI leader who had got himself elected to the Senate despite the party lacking the required number of votes in Punjab Assembly. The PPP too tried to get a seat through horse trading in Punjab but missed the goal by a few votes. The party however managed to get a number of MQM MPAs to leave their party and join the PPP.
With eyes riveted on power major political parties frequently compromise on morality. The PTI is brimming with turncoats who routinely change their party after extracting maximum benefits from it. The PML-N has brought back into its fold all the electables who had abandoned and discarded Sharif when he was in distress, then joined the king’s party knocked together by ISI’s Ehtesham Zamir and were inherited by the Q-League as a family heirloom. To form a government in Balochistan Nawaz Sharif borrowed legislators from those who matter. When they were retrieved by their handlers the party cried murder.
The major parties go after electables who have little understanding of the national issues and no qualms of conscience. This relieves the party of any obligation to the masses. But this also explains why the “crores of voters” they claim to have voted for them simply fail to spontaneously turn out to protest when they are thrown out of power by the man on the horseback or a bench of the SC. And why should they when they find themselves going down the poverty line, their children deprived of education and jobs, or dying of curable ailments on account of spurious medicines, lack of access to clean water, nutrition, or shortage of ventilators in hospitals?
